The Rise of Virtual Assistants: How VAs are Changing Today’s Business Landscape

Almost everything you do and every aspect of your life is affected by technology. From the car you drive to the smartphone you use to send out emails, modern inventions and advances heavily influence how you work. These days, even the traditional personal assistants are now working out of the office, changing into virtual assistants (VA).

In 2012, the Intelligent Virtual Assistant Market was valued at 352 million US dollars. By 2019, it is expected to reach 2,126.4 million US dollars in value, growing at a CAGR of 30.6 percent beginning from 2013. The largest contributor to the global intelligent virtual assistant in 2012 was North America, accounting for 39.6 percent.

VAs are equipped with a wide skillset. With the internet and communication tools like emails and Skype, there are very little tasks that a virtual assistant can’t do. A business-grade virtual assistant can handle tasks like email management, customer service, e-commerce management, social media management, and marketing. Furthermore, they can also take care of other workloads from lead generation to research and intelligence gathering.

The rise of VAs allows for scalable hiring

Businesses are now hiring VAs to collaborate with them and help improve their business processes. Additionally, hiring a virtual assistant will save you a lot of money because you only have to pay for their time. Since a VA works remotely, you don’t have to set up a separate office space with equipment for them. Imagine having someone to do your basic administrative work but you don’t need to pay for their insurances, health benefits, and taxes.

The financial crisis in 2008 caused numerous highly skilled professionals to lose their jobs. This caused a shift in the virtual work paradigm to have many of these laid-off workers to turn into freelancers and virtual assistants. For most businesses, it’s a cheaper and easier way to hire a business-grade virtual assistant from a company that recruits and vets highly skilled professionals. Due to the great recession, many business owners and entrepreneurs had to look elsewhere for cost effective workers to complete certain tasks to keep their businesses afloat in the competitive market.

The rise of VAs allows for dynamic collaboration

Companies are taking advantage of the skills and expertise of virtual assistants to implement fresh marketing methods to help their businesses grow. As an entrepreneur, you juggle hundreds of responsibilities every day in running your business. A virtual assistant can ease the strain and make your workload lighter by taking over administrative, technical, writing, and social media tasks so that you can focus on leveraging your business. There’s no doubt that you can delegate a lot of things to your VA.

Aside from taking care of daily tasks for entrepreneurs, virtual assistants are also starting to take on more social media responsibilities because businesses are acknowledging the increasing value of digital marketing. They can help run efficiently at every level.

There are multiple tools that you can use together with your virtual assistant to have a dynamic collaboration. These tools will make it easier for you and your VA to work effectively together virtually. Google Applications like Gmail is a great way to be in constant communication with your virtual assistant about the projects and tasks that you delegated to them. Google Docs collaborative works on a word, excel, or presentation file since it allows both of you to leave comments and make edits. For instant messaging, there’s Skype to address your voice call and screen sharing needs. Cloud storages like Google Drive and Dropbox gives you large cloud space for your file sharing and storing between you and your VA.

The rise of VAs allows for life and work balance

Aside from shaving time from your workweek, virtual assistants allow you to maintain a life and work balance. “Using a virtual assistant has reduced the amount of time I spend working in the evenings, which makes running a business—alongside a full-time job and parenting— a more sustainable lifestyle,” Andrew Ward, co-founder of Alameda String Academy with his wife Erica, said.

Most VAs are trained to follow routines and work independently, enabling you not to worry about constantly giving instructions for daily tasks. Ward shared that since working with a VA, he now has daily, weekly, and monthly tasks with defined SOPs that are taken care of automatically on schedule without him needing to think about it.

While your virtual assistant takes care of your time-consuming daily tasks in the background, you can focus on your business, giving attention to core business functions to build the company.

Andy Mindel, founder and CEO of Webventurer, said that having a VA has had a massive impact on his day to day work. “Instead of thinking I have to handle everything myself, a VA adds extra hands to get the work done. A virtual assistant allows me to focus on the parts of the business I should be focusing on rather than getting stuck in the detail,” he shares.

As an entrepreneur, it’s nothing new to wear multiple hats and play various roles in the company. However, taking on every task will keep you from maximized productivity. Working with a VA enables you to be flexible in terms of how you manage your business.

“It’s changed the way I think about work—I now think about what I can outsource first and once handed off, it frees me up to focus on other parts of the business,” Mindel said.

“It’s reduced the pressure to always be working, knowing that the business is moving forward even if I don’t have time to handle a task,” Ward agrees.

Virtual assistants are changing the business landscape by shifting the way businesses employ staff as more and more jobs can be done online. With VAs, an entrepreneur can shift his focus from time-consuming administrative tasks to more crucial responsibilities to help their brand grow. You’ll be free to do what you love doing with your company while your virtual assistant provides you with tailored services that meet your needs for a successful business.

About Pepper Virtual Assistants

Pepper Virtual Assistant Services is a business solutions firm that specializes in administrative assistance, customer support, CRM, copywriting, and personal virtual assistance. We take pride in our reliable service and responsive client handling which embodies our team’s optimal performance.

7 Comments

Thanks for the information,Every merketar wants to earn more results in short time. But long term will give more stability in earnings. Yes, there are ways to get there and you have figured out clearly. This is really informative for internet merketars to get maximum exposure and high traffic.

Amazing post Pepper. I believe we can’t achieve every other goals we’ve set without help from others. This where a VA comes in to help you achieve those goals. Try a VA today and see the difference they make to your business, blog or website.

Great read. In my experience as a VA, one thing my employers said that they were really amazed about my wide skill set. It’s really important that you get exposed to different fields. So if you’re a VA, and you get a lot of experience and good referrals, your skills would naturally grow and become honed further.

This is a very helpful article for all of us. It is true that VA are very helpful in ones business. The advantages are for both,for the client and the VA. The client has the option to lessen his or her workloads and for the VA it is a learning experience to help grow his or her career.

Thank you for this article. Technology dominates this era and it is wonderful to see that Virtual Assistants use it to their advantage. Anywhere you are in the world, they can help you in your mundane tasks so you can be efficient and effective on your business or project. In the same way, Virtual Assistants will be able to improve their skills and hone new ones.

On point. This article is really very helpful, it cites good points on VA’s; on how Virtual Assistants changes the way business does. It gives ideas for clients on how they are going to grow their business in a cheaper way but having excellent results and that’s of course with the help of a Virtual Assistants.

The article gives the reader an understanding of how VAs have grown. It is important that would-be VAs like I am read these types of articles to understand how this branch of the outsourcing industry work.

Current VAs would also benefit from this. With the rapid growth of the industry, they would be able to find newer opportunities, adding to their versatility.